The sustainable management of forest resources can only be achieved through a well-organized road network designed with the optimal spatial planning and the minimum environmental impacts. This paper describes the spatial layout mapping for the optimal forest road network and the environmental impacts evaluation that are caused to the natural environment based on the multicriteria evaluation (MC...

Within the past decade, several transportation planning decision support systems that combine heuristic programming techniques with geographic information systems (GIS) technology have been developed to meet forest operation challenges. These decision support systems, however, have not directly addressed the upslope influences of landslides in choosing routes from road networks. This paper prov...

Prevention and estimation of soil erosion from forest roads requires an understanding of how road design and maintenance affect sediment production. Seventyfour plots were installed on forest roads in the Oregon Coast Range to examine the relationship between sediment production and road attributes such as distance between culverts, road slope, soil texture, and cutslope height. An additional c...

The spatial extent of the transported materials from three road types was studied in forest soil and vegetative communities in Vermont. Hypotheses were two-fold: 1) soil chemical concentrations above background environment would reflect traffic volume and road type (highway>2-lane paved>gravel), and 2) plant communities close to the road and near roads with greater traffic will be disturbance-t...

A GIS compiled by the Departmental Government of Santa Cruz, Bolivia offers data that may help to resolve some competing theories of tropical deforestation. The GIS contains many attributes relating to land use at two points in time, 1989 and 1994, and allow us to address questions like: • What has been the impact of past road construction on deforestation and land use? • What impacts might be ...